Currently on a trip to Adelaide during the hot time of the year. Here’s hoping that every place I stay at has air conditioning XD

I’m planning on doing a bunch of drawing while I’m away from a proper internet connection XD Bit of traditional and maybe some pixel art. So basically I won’t be posting much til the 4 or 5th which is when I get back home.

I might post up some photos I’ve taken while I’m away too. Maybe.. I’ll see how I feel about it when I get back.

I grabbed a few games on the steam sale. I think pretty much all indie games. Not the best idea I’ve had considering that I still haven’t finished Pokemon Moon and I still have hundreds of games to play, but ah well. So I actually played two of the games I picked up and finished them. These two short games were called Replica and Orwell.

I think I get pretty emotional when playing games, I get really invested in the plot and become very immersed because playing these two games made me feel very uncomfortable. Both deal with the idea of Big Brother Surveillance and I’m under the umbrella that if you don’t have anything to hide, you shouldn’t have a problem with it. I mean with cameras out on streets and stuff recording what’s going on. Y’know public
places. But I draw the line at cameras in people’s homes or monitoring people’s devices to see/ hear their private conversations. It’s just wrong. I’ve always thought that people can misconstrue what’s being said because they don’t personally know the people whose being monitored. And I guess that these games have just reinforced my beliefs about that. It’s even got me thinking about the cameras that are in public places, like I completely understand why they’re so useful but are we giving away our privacy? Is this just a stepping stone to making us okay with the idea with further surveillance, after all if we have nothing to hide surely we should be fine with it.

Anyway back to the games. Both I highly recommend playing. They’re both kind of visual novels? Except I reckon it has a lot less reading and is a bit more interactive.

In Replica, basically you’re cracking into somebody’s phone and rooting around looking for any evidence that they’re responsible for a terrorist attack. You immediately find out that the person who’s accused is almost 17 years old. That leads you to figuring out the passcode for the phone. Everything the person has done on their phone, what social media accounts they use, what they look up for an innocent school assignment is just used as
ammunition to keep them trapped. It’s not hard to come to the conclusion that they had nothing to do with it but everything you find is just twisted. Anything completely innocent is made out to be villainous. You just feel horrible playing it. But there’s this burning curiosity to look further, to see what they’ve been up to, who they’ve been talking to. You always have the choice to stop playing and now you’re complicit. You, the player, are just as guilty as the person who’s making you crack the phone.

The game has multiple endings depending on if you follow orders or not, or if you look deeper into what’s on the phone. I think I got most of them but I had to look up a walkthrough. Basically I was trying to find out what the secret code sms meant, because I couldn’t find anything to interact with. I had tried earlier to call the number but I didn’t
get anywhere with it. I kinda accidentally spoiled it for myself… just too damn curious, I guess.

Gonna have to split this post up into two since it’s getting pretty long. So next post will have my thoughts on Orwell.

So I’ve basically learned why it’s the best practice to use PHP when doing form validation and submission. You just can’t let the user see what your form is doing… you really just can’t. I mean I’ve always been taught it but after having completely broken a site using a simple spam script (using their own code to send through the data), it just reinforced those lessons. Hopefully there’s no hard feelings.

Something new I learned today: There was no medieval barracks, they’re called a guardhouse and the dungeons used to be at the top of towers. There also used to be some dungeons where it was a vertical slit and the people were lowered down into it and basically forced to stand for however long they were kept in there.

The things you learn researching old towns for a d&d campaign >.>

To be fair though d&d is set in a fantasy medieval universe, so I could get away with getting a few things wrong.

So I’m writing a short D&D campaign to see how hard it is. What started out as a quickie has turned into a 5 hour+ session of research and thinking up situations that might arise. I also didn’t realize how much detail you have to put into areas to make them believable.

I have the adventure hook part done, now I have to work on the main body of the quest. There’s like so many different areas, that I have to write descriptions for >.> And come up with NPCs to inhabit all the areas, like semi-important ones. This is going to be so long…

Basically there’s two lovers: Romeus and Julia (names are placeholders atm). They’ve been lovers for quite a while but Julia’s parents do not approve since Romeus is of a lower station. So Julia’s been forced into an arranged marriage and Romeus has been falsely accused and thrown into jail to stop him from interfering. Their fate is now up to the player’s actions/ or inaction and they have like a day to figure things out.

There’s a few different endings for this one, most are very tragic since the source inspiration for this is a tragedy.